This is a translation and edition of two Latin farming manuals, Cato’s De Agricultura and Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum Libri Tres, presented together as a single volume of Roman farm management. The English rendering and the accompanying notes were made by an American editor writing under the name “A Virginia Farmer,” who signed the preface from Belvoir, Fauquier County, Virginia, in December 1912 and added a foreword to a second edition at Christmas 1917. The book is practical instruction, not narrative: it sets out how a Roman landowner of the late Republic ran a farm, kept livestock, and managed the poultry yard, warren, and fish pond attached to his country house.
The Core Argument
The editor’s case, laid out in a note on the Roman agronomists, is that a modern farmer can still profit from reading these ancients. He concedes at once what the Romans did not know — nothing of bacteria, of the nodular hypothesis, of plant metabolism or creatinine — and then lists what they did practice: green manuring with legumes, soiling, seed selection, testing soil for sourness, intensive cultivation, rotation, and the preservation of manure. Their whole system rested on the fallow. Cato, he notes, taught Agriculture to speak Latin; Varro cites fifty Greek authors beginning with Hesiod and Xenophon, and the Roman Senate thought Mago of Carthage important enough to order his Punic treatise translated. The claim is not that the Romans anticipated modern science but that their accumulated experience of working land is worth the attention of anyone who works it now.
Inside the Book
The Translator’s Preface and the Roman Agronomists
The edition opens with a transcriber’s note explaining that the book’s extensive footnotes were renumbered and gathered at the end. The title page presents Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro, rendered into English with notes of modern instances by “A Virginia Farmer,” dated 1918. In the Preface the editor recalls encountering Cato and Varro at a book stall on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, a find that carried his imagination back to the blue hills of Virginia, where corn was tasseling and cattle loafed in the pastures. Finding no readily available English version of the Roman agronomists, he made this translation in the spirit of Piero Vettori, the Florentine scholar painted by Titian, whose monument stands in Santo Spirito; Vettori’s preface to his Varro declares he undertook the work not to display learning but to help others study an excellent author. The editor confesses no such scholarly claim, anticipates criticism like Bentley’s remark to Pope, and offers the book to those who love the country. He used the texts and commentaries of Schneider and Keil—the latter more accurate, the former more sympathetic—and signed it F.H. at Belvoir, Fauquier County, Virginia, December 1912. A Foreword to the Second Edition notes the reprint allowed corrections and additions; the editor, having withheld his name from the title page to avoid parading in polite literature, now signs as Fairfax Harrison at Belvoir House, Christmas 1917.
The Note upon the Roman Agronomists
The Contents list Cato’s De Agricultura and Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum Libri Tres with chapter synopses. A prefatory note quotes Columella to argue that studying Roman farm management profits modern farmers, though they will find nothing on bacteria, the nodular hypothesis, plant metabolism, or creatinine. The Romans practiced green manuring with legumes, soiling, seed selection, soil testing for sourness, intensive cultivation, rotation, and manure preservation; their foundation was the fallow, and Varro quotes the proverb “Romanus sedendo vincit.” Varro cites fifty Greek authors beginning with Hesiod and Xenophon; Mago of Carthage wrote in Punic, and the Senate ordered his work translated. Columella says Cato taught Agriculture to speak Latin. Cato, born at Tusculum in 234 B.C., served in Spain and Greece and denounced Carthage; Varro, called by Quintilian “the most learned of the Romans,” was born on a Sabine farm in 116 B.C., wrote his treatise in his eightieth year, served under Pompey against the Pirates, surrendered to Caesar and was pardoned, and was later despoiled by Antony at Casinum. A further note details the parallels between Virgil’s Georgics and Varro. Cato’s text then begins with the dignity of the farmer, the buying of a farm, and advice to inspect repeatedly and choose good climate and soil.
Cato’s Rules for the Owner and Overseer
Cato advises counting wine presses and storage vats to judge a farm’s harvest, but remembering that what is done with tools matters more than their number; few tools mean lower operating costs, for a farm, like a man, will not retain much if it has spending habits. On arriving at the country house the owner should salute the household and tour the farm that day or the next, then summon the overseer to report on work done, what remains, and crops gathered, comparing results against the program laid out on the last visit. The overseer may excuse delays by citing sick or truant slaves, bad weather, and public road work; the owner should count stormy days and rehearse indoor tasks possible despite rain—washing and pitching wine vats, cleaning barns, sorting grain, hauling and composting manure, cleaning seed, mending gear and smocks. On feast days old ditches should be mended, roads worked, briers cut, the garden dug, hedges trimmed and clippings burned, the fish pond cleaned, with slave rations cut down compared with field work in fine weather. After calmly discussing these matters the owner orders neglected work completed. Accounts follow: the overseer reports wine and oil sold, prices, what is on hand and what remains for sale; security is taken where needed, unsettled matters agreed, needed items bought and superfluous items sold, leases made, written orders given, cattle reviewed, and surplus goods sold—oil, wine, corn, old cattle, worn-out oxen, cull sheep, wool, hides, and old and sick slaves. The good farmer’s appetite is to sell, not buy. The owner should be a good neighbour, avoid offending his own people, and gain neighbourhood goodwill for readier markets, easier work, aid in building, and protection in misfortune.
Laying Out the Farm and Stocking It
On laying out the farm, a hundred-jugera estate should be planted with vineyard, irrigated garden, osier bed, olive yard, meadow, corn field, wood lot, cultivated orchard, and mast grove. The farmer should plant diligently in youth but ponder before building; building is appropriate at thirty-six if the land has been farmed well. Buildings should be proportioned to the estate and the estate to the buildings, with ample oil cellars, wine vats, and casks to wait for high prices. The dwelling should suit one’s means; a good house in a good situation makes the owner come more often and more willingly, improving the farm and crops, for the master’s face is good for the land. Elm trees should be planted along roads and fence rows for leaves to feed sheep and cattle and for timber; reeds and willows at stream banks and wet places for osiers to tie vines.
Draft Animals and the Logic of Equipment
Varro turns first to the beasts that do the farm’s heavy work. Oxen destined for the wagon should be broken in by hauling an empty cart through the streets of a village or town, so that noise and crowds cease to spook them; and they should not always labour on the same side of the team, since alternating right and left spares them strain. On light land, as in Campania, cows or asses serve better than heavy steers, being easier to drive to a light plough. For mills and carrying, the choice among asses, cows, and mules depends on the provender at hand: an ass costs less to feed, a cow returns more profit. The farmer weighs soil against strength and profit, and chooses accordingly.
Dogs, too, are a matter of proportion: a few fierce animals beat a pack of curs, and they should be trained to watch by night and sleep by day chained in the kennel. Where meadows exist but no stock is kept, the good farmer sells his hay and grazes another man’s cattle. As for the mute implements of the farm, anything the land or the servants can produce—osier and wooden goods like hampers, baskets, sledges, mauls, and mattocks, and fibre goods like rope, twine, and mats—should never be bought. What cannot be made should be bought for use, not show, and where quality is near and cheap. Stolo cites Cato’s figures: for 240 jugera of olives, five sets of oil-making equipment with copper kettles, pots, and three-spouted ewers, three large wagons, six ploughs with shares, four manure carriers, eight iron pitchforks, as many hoes, and half as many shovels; for 100 jugera of vineyard, three sets of wine-press gear, covered vats of 800 cullei, and twenty grape baskets with twenty corn baskets. Cato prescribed large capacity so that no one need sell wine yearly, since old wine fetches a better price. He lists the iron tools as well: forty falces for the vineyard, five for rushes, three for pruning trees, ten for briers. Scrofa adds that the owner should keep an inventory at house and steading, that the overseer check everything and assign keeping places, and that items which cannot be locked away stand in plain sight—especially seasonal utensils like grape baskets, since what is seen daily is least endangered by thieves.
Sowing, Soil, and the Third Part of Agriculture
Agrasius asks Scrofa to proceed to the third part of agriculture, and Scrofa answers that profit comes from sowing. One must consider what and where to sow, since some lands suit hay, some corn, some wine, some oil. Forage crops include basil, mixed fodder, vetch, alfalfa, snail clover, and lupines. Rich land should not receive every crop, nor thin land be left unsown; light soil suits snail clover and legumes except chick peas, while rich land suits cabbage, wheat, and flax. Certain plants are grown to improve the land—lupines ploughed in before podding, or field beans taken before they ripen. Provision should be made for pleasure plantings like arbours and flower gardens, and for useful wet-place plants like willows and reeds. Field beans belong in corn land. Dry places, shade, and sun suit different plants: asparagus demands shade, while violets and garden flowers flourish in sun. Osiers supply basket ware, wagon frames, winnowing baskets, and grape hampers; ground should be reserved for hemp, flax, rush, and Spanish broom, yielding cattle shoes, thread, cord, and rope. Nursery planting between young orchard rows is acceptable before the roots spread. Stolo cites Cato: a rich, good-hearted, unshaded field should be planted in corn; a low-lying field in turnips, radishes, millet, and panic grass.
Olives, Vines, and the Standards of Time
Scrofa resumes on olives. Rich warm land suits the preserving olive radius major, Sallentina, round orchis, bitter posea, Sergian, Colminian, and the waxy albicera; whichever does best locally should be planted most extensively. An olive yard is not worth cultivating unless it faces west wind and sun; cold thin soil suits the Licinian olive, which in rich warm soil never makes a hostus and exhausts itself, becoming infected with red moss. The hostus is the yield of oil from one tree at each factus or pressing; some claim 160 modii, others 120. Cato advises planting elms and poplars around the farm for leaves to feed sheep and cattle and for lumber—not necessary everywhere, but useful as a wind break against the north where trees do not shut out the sun. Stolo adds Cato’s advice that wet ground should have poplar cuttings and reeds set three feet apart, with wild asparagus set out there too, and Greek willows around the reed bed to supply ties for vines.
On vines, Scrofa says the best land and sun suit the little Aminean, the twin Eugeneam, and the little yellow kind; rich or wet land suits the large Aminean, Murgentine, Apician, and Lucanian. Other vines, especially mixed varieties, do well in any land. In every vineyard the prop should shelter the vine against the north wind. Live cypresses as props are planted in alternate rows and not allowed to grow higher than necessary. Cabbages are never planted near vines, because they damage each other. Agrius fears the Sacristan may return before the fourth head, the vintage; Scrofa says to prepare grape baskets and ewer.
The text then gives two standards of time: the year’s revolution and the month’s measure. The sun’s journey divides into four seasons of three months or eight seasons of a month and a half—Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.
Neat Cattle and the Language of the Ox
Vaccius, whose very name ties him to cows, takes up the discussion of neat cattle. The genus Bos stands first in Italy, and he lingers over the etymology of the land itself—whether Italia comes from the Greek italos, a bull, or from the bull Italus that Hercules drove out of Sicily. The ox is man’s fellow labourer and the minister of Ceres; killing one was once a capital offence. Athens honours Buzyges and Argos Homogyros as the first to yoke oxen, and Vaccius piles up further proofs of the ox’s standing: the Greek compounds built on its name, Jupiter taking a bull’s form to woo Europa, the bull that protected Neptune’s children, and the bees said to be generated from an ox carcase, which Plautius latinized in a case involving the praetor Hirrius.
Cattle pass through four ages—calf, yearling, prime, and aged—and are divided by sex. A sterile cow is taura; a pregnant one is horda, the source of the hordicalia, or Fordicidia, festival. Buyers should look for breeding age, good conformation, black horns, broad brows, and black eyes. Black is the best colour, then red, chestnut, and white. Bulls should come of good breed and provenance: Gallic cattle work best in Italy, Ligurian are worthless, and Epirote surpass both Greek and Italian, though Italian cattle suit sacrifices for their size and white coats. Purchase formulae differ for broken, unbroken, butcher, and altar cattle. Neat cattle pasture best in groves with brushwood. Thin cows a month before breeding; fatten bulls two months prior and keep them separated. Two bulls serve seventy cows, turned in at the rising of Lyra. The side on which the bull leaves the cow indicates the calf’s sex. Cows should not be served under two years and most bear for ten. Stinting comes after the rising of the Dolphin, with gestation of ten months. An extraordinary claim holds that a newly altered bull can still impregnate a cow. Breeding cows need grass, water, and protection from crowding, flies, and cold. Suckling calves should not sleep with their dams. Weaning, castration, culling, and nurse cows all follow, with calves at six months getting wheat bran, barley meal, and young grass. Mago’s health rules are read often. Atticus keeps two bulls per seventy cows; he and Lucienus run herds of 120 cows each.
Asses, Horses, and Mules
Murrius, from Reate, says its asses are the best. Buy prime-age jacks and jennies of good breed—Arcadia for Peloponnesians, the Reate valley for Italians. There are two kinds: the wild onager, common in Phrygia and Lycaonia, and the domestic ass. Onagers tame easily and never revert. Buying conditions resemble those for other cattle. Feed them corn and barley bran. Jennies are bred before the solstice and carry twelve months. Jennies in foal are rested; jacks keep working. Foals stay with their dams the first year, are tied loosely the second, and broken the third. Asses drive mills, carry on farms, plough lightly in Campania, and form pack trains out of Brundisium or Apulia.
Lucienus keeps one stallion per ten mares. Breeding stock should be three to ten years old. Age is read from the teeth: at thirty months the milk incisors go; the fourth year brings more shedding and the canines; the fifth more incisors; the sixth the teeth fill; the seventh the mouth is permanent. Beyond that, age is guessed by projecting teeth and white brows at sixteen years. Mares should be medium-sized with broad quarters; stallions large and well-proportioned. Foal points reveal quality. Breeds are named by country—Thessalian, Apulian, Rosean. Good signs are colts that race and leap streams first. Buying follows Manilius, as with cattle and asses. Pasture them in grass meadows and stable-feed hay. Foaling mares get barley and water twice daily. Breeding runs from the vernal equinox to the solstice, the foal born on the tenth day of the twelfth month. The stallion is admitted twice daily under the origa, or studgroom. A stinted mare defends herself. If the stallion is averse, smear the mare’s parts with shrimp marrow. One anecdote tells of a stallion killing the groom who tricked him into covering his own mother. Pregnant mares work moderately, are kept from cold, and separated by poles; they are neither over-fed nor starved. Some breed every other year. Foals are led out on the tenth day, and the feeding regimen is spelled out. Weaning comes at two years; handling, bridling, and backing at three, which is better than at eighteen months. Farrago serves as a purgative. Different horses suit military, cart, breeding, racing, and carriage work. Castration produces geldings, called barrows or capons. Horse medicine is written down, and Greek veterinarians are called hippiatroi.
A freedman from Menas announces the sacrifice is ready. Murrius briefly covers mules: the mule comes from an ass out of a mare, the hinny from a horse out of a she-ass, and neither reproduces. A newborn ass colt is nursed by a mare for vigour. Feed straw, hay, and barley, and tend the foster mother carefully. An ass is fit for breeding at three years. The best breed is now Reate, where breeding jacks fetch thirty to forty thousand sesterces.
Breeding and Raising Dogs
Bitches are lined in early spring when in heat and pup about the solstice after three months.
The Hive and Its Governance
Varro calls the hive alvus, a belly, because it holds the honey that feeds the colony, and he wants the hive shaped like one: pinched at the waist, swelling below. Wicker hives get a coat of ox dung inside and out, since bees refuse rough surfaces. They stand sheltered under a wall, never touching it, in two ranks rather than four. Small entrances open at the middle on either side, and a removable cover sits on top—bark is best, pottery worst, since it bakes in summer and freezes in winter. The keeper inspects each hive three times a month through spring and summer, fumigating lightly, clearing out dirt and worms, and thinning the “princes” who stir sedition. Three royalties are reported—black, red, mottled—though Menecrates counts only two. Keep the mottled; kill the black, forever scheming, or he will flee with a faction. The small round mottled worker is best; the black-bellied drone is a thief; the wasp, a stinging impostor, must be kept off. Bees run wild in forests—smaller, hairier, better workers—or tame in cultivated places. A healthy swarm is thick, well-groomed, industrious; a poor one looks bristling and dusty. Move hives in spring, not winter, and never from good pasture to poor, or they desert. To transfer bees, rub the new hive with bee balm and set honeycomb by the entrance, lest an empty larder drive them off. Menecrates blames almond and cornel cherry blossoms for a bowel ailment cured by urine. Propolis, the gummy curtain bees draw between entrance and hive, sells on the Via Sacra for more than honey. Erithacen glues the cells and, smeared with bee balm, baits a swarm to settle where the keeper wishes. The comb is wax, six-sided cells, as many sides as the bee has feet. Different plants yield different harvests: food alone from pomegranate and asparagus, wax from olive, poor honey from fig, the best honey from thyme. Water must stand nearby—a shallow reservoir two or three fingers deep with projecting stones for perching. When pasture fails, the keeper boils figs in water and sets the paste out, or floats clean wool in honey water so bees drink without drowning. A swarm emerges when the hive sends its youth to found a colony, as the Sabines were once driven out by their own numbers. The signs are bees hanging at the entrance like grapes and a buzzing like soldiers breaking camp. The keeper throws dust, beats a copper vessel, and steers them onto a spot smeared with erithacen, then into a baited hive. Honey is taken when the cover shows the combs sealed as with a skin. Some leave a tenth, others more; exacting the same tribute yearly, like cropping corn land, yields less. Take honey at the rising of the Pleiades, again at summer’s end, a third time after their setting—then no more than a third, leaving two-thirds for winter. Pare soiled combs with a knife, protect weak swarms from strong, and sprinkle fighting bees with honey water or mead; they stop, crowd, and kiss. Fumigate lazy hives and set out bee balm and thyme.
Footnotes on Cato, Varro, and the Wider Tradition
The editorial notes trace Roman agriculture from the old peasant aristocrat on his few acres through the decay that followed the Punic Wars, when slave-worked estates swallowed Italy and the conquest of Sicily and Sardinia ended her breadstuff farming, much as Dakota wheat later undercut New York and Virginia. Cato saw the vine and olive coming and laid out his farm accordingly. Pliny quotes his advice to buy what others built rather than build oneself, enjoying another’s folly; Columella says a country house should please the owner’s wife; Mago urged selling one’s town house on buying a farm. Cato’s epigram that the forehead is prior to the back of the head recurs through agricultural literature and reaches back to Aeschylus and Xenophon, including the Persian king’s reply that the master’s eye fattens the horse. The notes gloss arbustum, Cato’s praise of cabbage, Lord Kames on oxen versus horses, the overseer as an indulged slave, Colonel Taylor on feeding slaves, Fitzherbert on the farmer’s wife, Columella on ploughing and manure, sheep folding in France, legumes and nitrogen, ensilage, amurca, and Cato’s magical homeopathy. Varro survives as an antiquary and dialogue-writer; Scipio’s capture of Carthage brought Mago’s agricultural works to Rome. Later notes compare ancient wine yields with French, praise Varro’s cheerful insistence on the land’s pleasure while noting it will not support life of its own motion, and quote Walter of Henley’s shrewd arithmetic on a wheat acre that costs more than it returns. The chestnut, absent from Varro’s trees, later fed Italians on necci as potatoes fed the Irish. The white chalk Scrofa saw manuring Transalpine Gaul was marl, unknown in Italy but long used in England. Seed selection, inarching, alfalfa, and the Gallic header all receive their lineages, down to the Roman street dangers and the Gallic tomacina, ancestor of mortadella.
The Editorial Footnotes: Cato’s Gaul and the Sacred Sites of Rome
The apparatus that follows Varro’s text is itself a small treatise, tracking Roman practice forward into the modern countryside. Footnote 132 identifies Cato’s “Gaul” as Lombardy, among the richest farming districts on earth, where Cistercian monks at Chiaravalle Abbey near Milan began irrigating the marchite meadows in the twelfth century. A single hectare there could yield 140 tons of grass in a season — 75 tons of hay, or 30 tons an acre — cut six times a year and fed green to Swiss cows for Parmesan, with hogs as the dairy by-product exported much as in Cato’s and Varro’s day. The Lombard proverb settles the matter: “Chi ha prato, ha tutto.”
Footnote 133 turns to Virgil’s use of Lavinium’s founding, the sacred city where the Penates dwelt and to which processions went from Rome until Christianity became the state religion; its site is identified with Practica, where shepherds winter, fleeing malaria in summer. Footnote 134 quotes Polybius on Italian swineherds, who drive pigs from in front by horn rather than from behind as in Greece — huge droves along the Tuscan and Gallic coasts, one sow raising a thousand pigs, the horn sorting mixed droves without trouble. Bishop Latimer recalls a hog call from his youth; the Virginia call is untranscribable, perhaps the original of the “rebel yell.”
Oxen, Horses, and the Maremma Dog
Footnote 135 notes the Greek salutation struck austere Romans of Scipio’s age as preciosity; Lucienus’ jesting apology refers to Lucilius’ epigram preserved by Cicero, and it was the word Romans taught parrots. Footnote 136 records that the working ox was respected as a fellow laborer: Valerius Maximus cites a citizen executed for killing a plough ox to feed his child, and Ovid puts the sentiment in Pythagoras’ mouth. Footnote 137 admits the commentators know nothing of Plautius or Hirrius; Archelaus wrote a lost Bugonia, and Plautius perhaps implied good might come of Hirrius’ evil, Vaccius citing it to suggest Varro’s attempt might provoke useful discussion. Footnote 138 notes Darwin cites this passage on Java cattle crossing with wild Banteng, though crossing wild blood is not always successful, as a hybrid beast at Halle showed.
Footnote 139 has Pliny saying Scythians preferred mares for war and Aristotle that they rode pregnant mares to ease parturition; the mare Keheilet Ajuz, abandoned as a newborn filly, followed her mother across the desert and founded the best Arab family. Footnote 140 draws horse colors from Virgil — best bay and roan, least esteemed white and dun — supporting Ridgeway’s theory of the thoroughbred’s North African origin, with Etruscan horses probably improved Northern and Apulian an admixture of Libyan blood. Footnote 141 notes Aristotle preceded Varro in advising a mare rest a year like a fallow. Footnote 142 records mules used from earliest times — Homer’s Nausicaa and Priam, mule races, and Simonides’ ode refusing “semi-asses” until paid. Footnote 143 traces the white Maremma sheepdog to the woolly Spitz figured on Etruscan coins, and Footnote 144 gives Maeterlinck’s argument that the dog alone has allied with man, other animals serving through indifference, cowardice, or stupidity, the cat tolerating us as parasites. Footnote 145 finds the method of securing a dog’s affection recommended in seventeenth-century editions of Maison Rustique; Footnote 146 quotes the proverb “canis caninam non est”; Footnote 147 notes Aristotle and Pliny differ on how long puppies are blind.
Shepherds, Slaves, and the Villa Publica
Footnote 148 recalls Spartacus recruiting among shepherd slaves in 72–71 B.C., as did Caelius and Milo in 48 B.C., and Footnote 149 cites Gaius on acquiring slaves under Roman law. Footnote 150 describes modern Italy’s conical capanne, shepherds’ winter huts, flocks driven to the mountains in May, fierce white dogs, lambs slaughtered for the Roman market, ricotta made from ewes’ milk, twenty-five men living as celibates; Footnote 151 adds that modern shepherds leave women behind, while Footnote 152 notes women still work with babes in Venetian rice fields and coal ships in the East. Footnote 153 has Maison Rustique disagreeing that a steward need not read or write. Footnote 154 places the temple and fig tree at the Palatine’s foot near the Lupercal, where Romulus and Remus were suckled. Footnote 155 gives Fitzherbert’s advice that greasing a sheep’s mouth with good meat is the best grease; Footnote 156 notes Pliny saying most nations learn barbers after letters, and that Varro wore a beard. Footnote 157 traces Cowper’s verse translating Varro’s “divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes,” Cowley probably his source.
The Dialogue of Book III and the Bee-Keepers
Footnote 158 sets Book III’s scene at the villa publica in Rome, characters named for aviary, barnyard, and bee-stand denizens. Footnote 159 identifies Appius Claudius Pulcher, who served under Lucullus, was Augur, Consul, and Censor, and wrote on augural law, fixing the dialogue’s date. Footnote 160 notes the Velinus drained Rosea’s pastures below Reate, its lime deposits blocking its channel; M. Curius Dentatus opened a canal in 272 B.C., and Interamna complained for two hundred years.
Key Ideas
The single most quoted principle in the volume is the proverb Varro cites: Romanus sedendo vincit, the Roman conquers by sitting still — by patience, by waiting for the price and the season rather than forcing them. Cato’s version of the same idea is that the good farmer’s appetite is to sell, not to buy. A farm, he warns, will not retain much if it has spending habits, and few tools mean lower operating costs; what is done with tools matters more than how many there are.
Cato’s manual is a set of blunt directives. Inspect a farm repeatedly before buying it, and judge the harvest by counting wine presses and storage vats. On arriving at the country house, salute the household and tour the farm that same day or the next, then summon the overseer to report what has been done, what remains, and what crops have been gathered. Compare the results against the program laid out on the last visit, and count the stormy days the overseer will plead — then rehearse the indoor tasks that rain does not prevent: washing and pitching wine vats, cleaning barns, sorting grain, hauling and composting manure, cleaning seed, mending gear, mending smocks and hoods. On feast days, old ditches get mended, briers cut, the garden dug, hedges trimmed and the clippings burned. The master’s face, Cato insists, is good for the land; a good house in a good situation makes the owner come more often and more willingly.
His overseer is drawn in detail. He should keep discipline, respect others’ rights and uphold his own, settle quarrels, punish fault, and see that no one lacks food or drink, since generosity prevents picking and stealing. He should not gad or drink, should keep his hands busy, should not think he knows more than the master, should lend no money unbidden, should never lend seed, feed, corn, wine, or oil except in emergency against a neighbour’s exchange, should sell nothing without the master’s knowledge, and should consult no soothsayer, fortune teller, necromancer, or astrologer. He rises first and goes to bed last. He keeps the ploughs and shares repaired and plans work in ample time, because if one thing is late, everything is late. The housekeeper, if given to him as wife, should not be wasteful, should not gossip with neighbours, receive visitors in the kitchen, or gad about.
Varro’s treatise is a dialogue, and its speakers argue about definitions before they get to work. Scrofa demands to know whether agriculture means only planting the land or also feeding sheep and cattle; Stolo holds that grazing belongs to a separate treatise on live stock, since the farmer (villicus) and the herdsman (magister pecoris) are different occupations. Fundanius answers with a musical analogy: pastoral life is the right-hand pipe that led and gave the cue, agriculture the left that follows in accompaniment, citing Dicaearchus’s Life of Greece to show that men were herdsmen before they learned to plough. Agrius warns against pushing the analogy too far, and the talk turns to the law forbidding a farmer to graze a young orchard with goats — the pestiferous animal, he says, that astrology placed in the heavens near the Bull. Goats found among vines are sacrificed to Father Bacchus; nothing of the goat kind is sacrificed to Minerva, because their spittle is poison to the olive.
On soil, Varro’s Scrofa distinguishes three senses of terra — the orb of the earth, a country, and the soil in which seeds are sown — and then sorts mixed soils by admixture (rock, marble, sand, loam, clay, red ochre, dust, chalk, gravel) and by grade, each with three qualities: very wet, very dry, moderate. Spelt rather than wheat in wet land, barley rather than spelt on dry. Fat soils show heavy vegetation; lean soils lie bare, as in the territory of Pupinia, where foliage is meagre, vines starved, straw never stools, and the fig tree does not bloom. Diophanes of Bithynia held that the best indication of suitability comes from the soil itself or from what grows in it.
On measurement, every country has its own unit: the jugum in Further Spain, the versus in Campania, the jugerum among the Romans and Latins. A jugum is what a pair of oxen can plough in a day; the jugerum contains two square actus; the smallest fraction is the scripulum, ten feet square. Two jugera were Romulus’s first headright and thus the unit of inheritance, the haeredium; a hundred haeredia made a centuria.
On siting the steading, Varro advises the foot of a wooded hill with rich pastures, facing the healthiest breeze, best east for summer shade and winter sun. Do not face a river — cold in winter, unhealthy in summer — and avoid swamps, which when dry breed invisible animalculae breathed into the body and causing grave maladies. Asked what to do with such an inherited farm, Agrius answers: sell it, or give it away. High ground is best, ventilating noxious gases and exposing to sun all day. The overseer’s room should be near the entrance so he knows who comes and goes at night; the kitchen near his room, since in winter there is great activity before daylight. Every farm should have two manure pits, or one divided, new manure in one and well-rotted in the other, with the sides and top protected from the sun by leaves and branches, for the sun draws out elements the land requires.
On equipment, Cato’s figures are given for a two-hundred-and-forty-jugera olive farm: five sets of oil-making implements, copper kettles, pots, ewers with three spouts, three large wagons, six ploughs with shares, four manure carriers, eight iron pitchforks, as many hoes, half as many shovels. For a hundred jugera of vineyard: three sets of wine-press implements, covered storage vats of eight hundred cullei, twenty grape baskets and twenty corn baskets. Cato prescribed large capacity so one need not sell wine yearly, since old wine sells better. Scrofa adds that the owner should keep an inventory at house and steading, and that items which cannot be locked up should be kept in plain sight, especially seasonal utensils like grape baskets, since daily-seen items are least endangered by thieves.
On seed, Varro distinguishes the seed imperceptible to the senses — hidden when disseminated in air, as Anaxagoras held, or spread over land by surface water, as Theophrastus maintained — from the visible seed the farmer must study. Age can change a seed’s very nature, as when rape grows from old cabbage seed and vice versa. On propagation he sets out four methods: transplanting, cuttage, graftage, and inarching. A pear cannot be grafted on an oak, though it may on an apple. Soothsayers warn that as many grafts as a tree bears, so many lightning bolts will strike it, since each graft (ictu) generates a bolt. Vine scions are taken off three days before grafting so excess moisture drains; figs and pomegranates, being dry by nature, must be grafted immediately. Of the four, graftage is preferred for slow-developing trees like the fig, whose seeds are the tiny grains in the fruit, scarcely able to sprout. Small, hard seeds germinate slowly; soft ones more spontaneously, just as girls grow faster than boys.
On yields, the figures are striking: a modius and a half of alfalfa seed sows a jugerum; beans take four modii, wheat five, barley six, spelt ten. The same seed yields ten-for-one in some places, fifteen-for-one in Etruria, and near Sybaris in Italy one hundred-for-one, as claimed for Syria at Gadara and Africa at Byzacium. Agrius reports that in Olynthia they crop every year but get a greater yield every third year; Stolo holds that a field ought to lie fallow every other year, or at least bear a less demanding crop.
On storage and marketing, the practical detail continues. Grain is removed for cleaning once weevils begin damaging it, spread in the sun with bowls of water nearby, since the weevils swarm onto the water and drown. Those storing grain in pits called silos must not remove grain for some time after opening, because entering a recently opened silo risks suffocation. Amurca, as it flows from the oil mill, is skimmed twelve times over six months, the last skimming on the waning moon, then boiled down by two-thirds. Must should not be racked while fermenting, nor until fermentation has advanced enough that the wine may be considered made; old wine is not made until a year is completed. Perishables should be sold promptly, keepable goods retained to sell when the price is high, since commodities kept long, if marketed at the proper time, may yield interest and even double profit.
Themes
The book is, among other things, an elegy for a way of life its authors believed was already passing. Varro’s second book opens on the decay of country life: ancestors esteemed Romans living in the country above town-dwellers, dividing time to devote only one day a week to town affairs and the remaining seven to country life. Persisting in this, they accomplished two things — farms were fertile through good cultivation, and they enjoyed the best of health. Now, Varro complains, most gentry crowd into town, abandoning sickle and plough, preferring to exercise their hands in theatre and circus rather than corn field and vineyard, so that they must buy the very corn that fills their bellies, hauled from Africa and Sardinia, while bringing home the vintage in ships from Cos and Chios. Lands the shepherds who founded the city taught their children to cultivate are now converted by later descendants from corn fields back to pastures, violating even the law in greed of gain. He insists on the distinction: a shepherd is one thing and a ploughman another; herded cattle do nothing to create what grows but destroy it with their teeth, while the yoked ox conduces to maturity of grain.
A second thread is the tension between use and luxury, ancient simplicity and modern extravagance. Fundanius remarks that a farm would be more of a farm if buildings followed ancestral diligence rather than descendants’ luxury: ancestors built for use, we for unbridled luxury; their barns were bigger than their houses, the contrary today. Merula traces the same arc in the villa’s appendages. Ancestors had two poultry places — the courtyard for chickens, profiting from eggs and pullets, and above ground for pigeons in dormers or on the roof. Now hen-houses are called ornithones, housing thrushes and pea-cocks for the master’s delicate appetite, with roofs larger than formerly covered an entire farmhouse. Axius’s father never saw game but rabbits, nor extensive enclosures of many jugera for wild boars and roe bucks. Fish ponds, once fresh water stocked with cat fish and mullets, have been carried to the sea, herding sea fish into them; Sergius Orata took his cognomen from the goldfish and Licinius Murena from the lamprey. Philippus, entertained at Casinum by Ummidius, tasted a pickerel caught in Varro’s river, spat it out, and exclaimed, “May I perish, but I thought it was fish!”
A third theme is the sheer weight of management — the book’s real subject. Cato’s overseer and Varro’s flock master are both, in effect, administrators: they keep accounts, give written orders, take security, settle quarrels, maintain discipline, and carry a book of physic. Cossinius holds that the flock master should have written rules of leech craft practicable without a physician, and must have some education to keep flock accounts. The owner, for his part, is told to compare results against the program laid out on his last visit, to count the stormy days, and to remember that work may stop but expenses go on.
Why It Matters
The volume’s value to a modern reader is double. As a document, it preserves the working assumptions of Roman agriculture at the height of the Republic — the fallow at its foundation, the jugerum and the scripulum, the manure pit and the silo, the drift ways between Apulian winter pasture and the summer grazing above Reate. As a manual, it survives because the problems it addresses have not changed much: how to judge land before buying it, how to site a steading, how to keep an overseer honest, how to hold grain and wine for a better price, how to tell a good ram from a bad one by his tongue. The editor’s own hope was modest — he offered the book to those who love the country, in the spirit of Piero Vettori, who said he undertook his edition of Varro not to display learning but to aid others in studying an excellent author. The book ends, as Varro’s dialogue does, not with a harvest but with a death: the freedman of the Sacristan runs up with tearful eyes to beg pardon for the wait and invite the company to a funeral the following day, his master struck down by a knife blow in a crowd, hearing only an exclamation that a mistake had been made. The guests descend from the temple bewildered more by the hazard of human life than surprised such a fate was possible at Rome, and go their several ways.
